Category Archives: Guest Blogs

In a previous article, we described the keen interest in employment in the public sector by millenials. Federal employment provides many of the most important attributes that students identify as attractive for their careers. This is evidenced by federal agencies being chosen among the top “ideal employers” identified in Universum’s student survey of tens of thousands of college students: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Institutes of Health, Peace Corps, Department of State, and NASA, to name a few. However, despite the appeal of public sector careers, most government agencies are quite inefficient in their recruiting and selection processes and consequently lose many top candidates to the private sector.

Compounding this handicap is the fact that the job market for new campus graduates has heated up once again. According to the 2014 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers plan to increase their hiring from the class of 2014 by 7.8 percent for their U.S. operations. While the job market is certainly tough for some recent graduates, the most sought-after candidates are receiving multiple offers with higher salaries. Agency recruiting and hiring practices must change to effectively for the desired talent.

Here are 11 suggestions that the public sector might deploy that parallel successful practices in the private sector: keep reading on ere.net…

By Melissa Suzuno, January 29, 2014

Picture this: You’re at a campus career fair. Your booth is all set, you’ve got a perfectly poised pyramid of water bottles to hand out, you’re pumped and ready to get students fired up about working for your company. There’s just one teensy problem with this scenario—when it comes time to actually talk to students, none of them have even heard of your company. This kind of kills your mojo, especially when you see competitors who have long lines of students who can’t wait to speak to their recruiters.

This scenario is sadly pretty common with companies that are new to college recruiting, but the good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take to measure and build your brand on campus. We caught up with Jeff Goodman, Principal Consultant at Campus Strategic Partners to learn more about branding your company on college campuses.

This is not an easy time to be a public servant. Heated budget battles and rhetoric about the size, function, scope, and effectiveness of the public sector have generated criticism — not just of government, but also of the public servants who deliver government services.

It’s ironic that while the government is being criticized, Americans continue to ask public servants to solve some of our nation’s toughest problems: revitalizing the economy and putting people back to work, supporting a war that has stubbornly persisted for more than a decade, protecting the public, eliminating poverty, improving our education system, providing affordable health care, and so on.

This paradox — attacking public servants while also expecting them to solve problems other sectors can’t handle — presents an extreme challenge for government leaders and agencies as they strive to maintain or improve performance despite harsh criticism and shrinking resources.

After more than three decades of wandering through the wilderness of American universities with little direction and even less insight, campus recruiting professionals now have access to a field guide of sorts.

By Jill Cueni-Cohen

Thanks to the Bethlehem, Pa.-based National Association of Colleges and Employers, companies and organizations now have a clear framework and expert advice when establishing or strengthening their university relations and recruiting programs.

Unveiled for the first time at NACE’s annual conference in June, the Professional Standards for University Relations and Recruiting were designed through the NACE Foundation in a collaborative effort by NACE employer members to help smooth the way for university recruiting professionals. According to NACE Executive Director Marilyn Mackes, “organizations that are engaged or want to engage in university recruiting will now have clear direction for achieving results.”

In July 2012, approximately 40 recruitment experts from companies large and small began working on the new set of standards with the mission of helping HR recruiters be moreeffective in their university relations and recruiting practices.

“This was a long time in coming,” says Dan Black, director of Americas recruiting at New York-based Ernst & Young and president of NACE’S board of directors. Black worked on the standards and says it has been nearly 40 years since recruiters had any kind of formal guidance in place.

“Creating the standards was a much-needed starting point, and there was a big mountain to climb, because we basically had nothing,” he says.

Black credits the group’s success to bringing outside consultant Jeff Goodman in to lead the project. “As an extension of NACE, he enlisted the help of dozens of practitioners, each to work on a specific high level of expertise,” says Black. “To be able to offer up to our membership and beyond this amalgam of great leadership by people who are known and respected; that makes it a uniquely useful product.”

Currently the principal of Campus Strategic Partners, in Dallas, Goodman calls the process of creating the standards a really “daunting task,” noting that the original standards had been written in 1976. “They had been typed on a typewriter,” he says, “but what’s struck me is that everything written back then still rings true today. Yes, there is so much more detail that needed to be conducted, and that was what I set out to do.”